#GVP Series II card
10 messages in this thread
Joe,
Are you certain that the internal drive in the A590 is a SCSI drive?
Although I don't have an A590 myself, I had heard that it was an IDE drive
internally, with a SCSI port for additional devices. Perhaps the drive's
model number will shed some light on the problem – could you possibly post
it. I've got GVP SCSI hard drives on my A500 and A2000, and never had a
problem with the installation software at all.
Hope this helps. 8)
David
– via Whap!
David, I know that the A590s were shipped with a variety of different
manufacturers drives … but normally plugged into the XT internal
connector.
However, there _is_ a SCSI connector internally and it is quite possible to
have a SCSI drive installed instead (I know that some retailers over here
will change the 20Meg Western Digital, Epson or whatever, to a 40/80 or
greater SCSI drive and sell its as a package).
I did the change myself and have a Wren 140Meg SCSI drive internally
fitted.
Mike (Whapping from the UK)
David,
Sorry if I confused you. Yes, you are quite right; the standard drive
fitted in the a590 is a dreadful Western Digital XT drive. However I
replaced it with a Fujitsu SCSI drive some months ago so I simply took it
out of the a590 case and mounted it on the GVP card.
Unfortunately the Faaastprep diskette supplied with the card was no good
but I now have a working copy and all is well. I don't think much of the
manual but managed to prep the drive ok despite this.
Thanks for your consideration.
Joe – Whapping from the UK.
Joe,
Glad that you got it going OK. 8)
My guess would be that GVP relies on the ease of use of the Faastprep
software package rather than an extensive written manual. Of course, that
doesn't do you any good if you get a bad diskette. I was quite impressed
with Faastprep when I ran it. What were your impressions of the package?
David
David,
Once I managed to figure it out it was very efficient and created two
partitions without any user interference. BUT I had some trouble getting
the automatic option to run at first and kept getting a message about
incompatible no of blocks/tracks/sectors vs disk size. As all I had done
was click on the Automatic icon you can perhaps understand my initial
confusion.
After a minor panic I went into the advanced options and tried the 'Read
Drive' button. Lo and behold the various pointers were reset correctly and
on going back into automatic all went without a hiccup. I particularly
liked the idea of feeding floppies for copying onto the hard disk – very
neat. This brings me back to the manual which was no comfort in this time
of great stress<g>.
Having previously used the C= HDToolbox I was, I confess, quite impressed
with Faaastprep which was much slicker. I wonder whether the fact that the
drive had been previously formatted using HDToolbox confused GVP's software
?
Joe – Whapping from the UK.
Joe,
I'm not certain whether HDToolbox might have confused Faaastprep or not. In
my case, I moved up with a drive previously only used on a GVP controller,
rev 2.3. I was very pleased with the operation.
David
– via Whap!
Joe;
I doubt very much that FasstPrep was confused by HDToolBox. I have
formatted SyQuest cartridges on both and neither machine has trouble
reformatting/partitioning etc.
An Amiga message processed by Whap!,
bill
Thanks for your thought David and Bill. Perhaps it was somethig I did after
all. I'll have to take more note of what goes on next time although
reformatting 85mb drives is not something I want to do too regularly!
Perhaps when someone gives me a scsi tape drive?
Joe – Whapping from the UK.